12

In Samara

In the autumn [of 1889] the family moved to Samara, where, together with the Yelizarovs, they occupied the upper half of a two-storey wooden house with six or seven rooms. The city became the principal residence of the Ulyanovs for nearly four and a half years. In the life of Lenin these years form a special, Samara period. Later, in the middle of the 1890s, Samara became, not without Lenin’s influence, the unofficial Marxist capital of the Volga region. We must, therefore, take a look, if only a brief one, at the profile of this city.

The administrative history of Samara differs little from the history of Simbirsk; the same struggle with the nomads, the same period of founding the ‘city’ – or rather the building of wooden fortifications – the same struggle with Razin and Pugachev. But the social profile of Samara was nevertheless quite different. Simbirsk came into being as a secure nest for the gentlefolk. Samara, situated deeper on the steppes, became a centre of the grain trade only after the abolition of serfdom. Although the main street of the city did bear the name Dvoryanskaya, this was only a gesture designed to imitate other cities. In reality, serfdom barely touched the Samara steppes. The town had neither ancestry nor tradition. Unlike Kazan, it had no university and, consequently, it had neither academics nor students. Life in Samara was shaped by powerful cattlemen, wheat farmers, grain merchants, millers – sturdy pioneers of agrarian capitalism Indifferent not only to aesthetics but also to personal comfort, they laid out no aristocratic gardens with mock-classic architecture, parks, and statues of nymphs. What they needed were docks, warehouses, mills, grain barns, bolted gates, and heavy locks. They did not keep hunting dogs, but watchdogs. Only upon amassing great wealth did they build themselves big stone houses.

Around the grain bourgeoisie of the Volga, with their docks and warehouses, there lurked a nomad and semi-nomad folk. At one time, the original free peasants of Samara had tried, following the example of the German Mennonites in Sarepta, to plant the lucrative crop of mustard. But the Russians lacked both know-how and perseverance. From the unsuccessful mustard plantations the Samara townsmen retained only the bitterness of disappointment and the ironical nickname ‘mustard-plasterers’. When angry or, particularly, when drunk, the inhabitants of Samara villages, together with the barge haulers, caused the police much trouble. But their revolts were hopeless, as was all of their unhappy life.

In 1887 Shelgunov, the same old man to whom the Petersburg workers subsequently addressed a salutation, gave an interesting description of Samara, the city of frontiersmen.

Alongside palatial residences there are empty lots and fences or chimneys of houses that had burned down fifteen years earlier and would never be rebuilt, just as the reckless and ruined frontiersman would never stand on his feet again. Farther on, beyond the fences and the vacant lots and the smaller and smaller houses of the suburbs, stretch out the little villages of freemen where huts with two or three windows are crowded together. Here the village has abandoned the steppes and settled in the city in order to work for the frontiersmen…

Almost no industry, and therefore virtually no industrial workers, existed in Samara. And since the city was also free of the infection of a university, it appeared on the list of harmless cities in which the authorities permitted revolutionaries who had served their term of Siberian exile to settle for a time. It was also a city to which, from time to time, suspect individuals from the capital and from university towns were restricted, under police surveillance. This transient community, which up to the early 1890s was almost entirely Populist, served as a rallying centre for the local leftist-oriented young people. Not only zemstvo members and merchants, but at times even government functionaries, permitted themselves to play the liberal with impunity in this province where there was neither aristocratic domination nor student or worker unrest. The obscure revolts of waterfront folk were never considered political. Among those under surveillance, one could always find sensible and honest zemstvo officials, administrators, secretaries, and tutors, although by law many of these professions required official clearance. According to the Samara police records for 1889, Vladimir Ulyanov, too, gave private lessons. The Samara administration closed its eyes to these petty transgressions by the unreliable elements.

The former exiles and persons under surveillance, acting as a centre of gravity for circles of high-school students, seminarians, or teachers from the zemstvo nursing schools, with the addition of the students who came for the summer – all these constituted the vanguard, so to speak, of the gubernia. From this little world, threads led away to the liberals among zemstvo people, lawyers, merchants, and government functionaries. Both groups lived by the liberal Populist paper Russkie Vedomosti The more substantial of these citizens were chiefly interested in the moderate and ingratiating editorials and in the zemstvo news; the radical youth avidly read die foreign dispatches. Of the monthlies, the left wing avidly devoured each new volume of Russkoye Bogatstvo, especially the articles of the talented Populist columnist Mikhailovsky, a tireless preacher of 'subjective sociology’. More-solid citizens preferred Vestnik Yevropy and Russkaya mysl, mouthpieces of veiled constitutionalism. Propaganda in Samara did not reach beyond the bounds of the intelligentsia. The educational level of the few workers was extremely low. Individual railroad workers, to be sure, would join a Populist circle, not with the idea of propagandising fellow workers, but rather to raise their own educational level.

Those under surveillance openly visited the Ulyanov family; the Ulyanov family, in turn, had lost any reason to avoid contact with those considered enemies of the tsar and the country. The widow of the state counsellor came in contact with a world to which she had hardly given a thought during her husband’s lifetime. Her circle of acquaintances no longer consisted of provincial functionaries and their wives, but of old Russian radicals, outcasts who had spent many years in prison and exile and reminisced about their friends who had died while engaging in terrorist activities or armed resistance, or at hard labour in prisons – in short, people of that world which Sasha had entered, never to return. They held unusual views about many things, their manners were not always the most impeccable, and some of them were distinguished by eccentricities acquired during long years of enforced solitude. Still, they were not bad people. On the contrary, Maria Alexandrovna must have become convinced that they were good people, selfless, faithful in friendship, and brave. It was impossible not to be friendly to them, and at the same time it was impossible not to fear them. Could they not draw another son off on to the fatal road?

Among the revolutionaries who lived in Samara under police surveillance, Dolgov stood out as a participant in the famous Nechayev affair. Then there was the Livanov couple. The husband had been involved in the case of the 193, while the wife had been a participant in the Odessa affair of Kovalsky, who had attempted armed resistance when arrested. Conversations with these people, especially the Livanovs, whom Anna Yelizarova describes as ‘typical members of People’s Will, people of integrity and devotion to their cause’, became for Vladimir a true practical academy of revolution. He eagerly listened to their tales and asked question after question, going into every last detail in order to reconstruct in his imagination the course of the past struggles. The great revolutionary epoch, which was still unstudied and almost unrecorded, and from which the new generation had, moreover, been separated by a stage of reaction, now arose before Vladimir in living human images. This young man possessed the rarest of gifts: he knew how to listen. Everything that touched upon the revolutionary struggle interested him: ideas, people, conspiratorial methods, underground techniques, forged passports, prison regulations, court trials, conditions of exile, and escape.

One of the centres for the radical zemstvo intelligentsia in Samara was the house of the magistrate Samoilov. Yelizarov often visited there, and he once had the good idea of bringing along his brother-in-law. Many years later, this visit enabled Samoilov’s son to reconstruct the image of young Ulyanov in a few very vivid strokes:

'When I went out to shake hands with the guests, my attention was instantly caught by a newcomer. At the table, in a relaxed manner, sat a very slender young man. He had ruddy cheeks and a somewhat Kalmyk face, a sparse slightly reddish moustache and beard, evidently never touched by scissors, and a mocking expression in his lively dark eyes. He spoke little, but this was evidently not at all because he felt ill at ease in unfamiliar surroundings. It was perfectly clear that this circumstance did not bother him in the least. Quite the contrary, I definitely remember noting that M. T. Yelizarov, usually quite at home among us, on this occasion seemed, if not exactly embarrassed by the new guest, then perhaps somewhat intimidated by him. The conversation dealt with unimportant matters and touched, as I remember, upon the student movement in Kazan as a result of which Vladimir Ilyich (for it was he) had been compelled to leave Kazan University … He evidently ,, was not inclined to regard his fate tragically … In the middle of the conversation, while summing up some conclusion that evidently seemed to him particularly apt, he suddenly burst out laughing, with a gusty, short, distinctly Russian laugh. It was clear that some keen incisive idea that he had been groping for before had come to mind. That laugh, healthy but not without cunning accentuated by crafty wrinkles in the corners of his eyes remains in my memory. Everybody laughed but he was already sitting quietly, again listening to the general conversation and fixing upon those present an attentive and slightly ironic look.'

When the guests left the house, the host, expansive by nature, summed up the impression with the excited words, ‘What a brain!’ This exclamation of his father merged for ever in the son’s memory with the image of young Lenin – the ironic twinkle of his eyes and his short ‘Russian’ laugh. ‘What brain!’ This portrait, caught by a keen memory, rewards for labouring through the thousands of pages of pathetic impotence in which the majority of memoirs are drowned.

We are surprised only at the words ‘a very slender young man’. Semyonov, another citizen of Samara, called Vladimir ‘skinny’. In his childhood Volodya was called ‘little block’. In his high-school pictures he looks stocky. Another Samara citizen, Klements, writes of him, ‘This was a young man of short stature but sturdy build with a fresh ruddy face.’ He is similarly described three years later by Lalayants, an intimate of his, as being ‘of short stature but very strong and sturdily built’. This description corresponds more closely to what we know of Vladimir in those years: that he was a great walker, a hunter, a fine swimmer and skater, a gymnast, and, above all, a man who loved to make his voice break on the high notes. Still it is possible that he arrived in Samara a thin youth and filled out afterwards in the fresh air of the steppes.

It is absolutely certain that it was precisely during the Samara period that Vladimir Ulyanov became a Marxist and Social Democrat, but the Samara period lasted almost four and a half years. How does the evolution of a youth fit into this spacious frame? His official biographers have been spared any difficulties on this point once and for all, thanks to the very convenient theory that Lenin became a revolutionary through heredity and was a Marxist at birth. But this is not quite true. We do not have, to be sure, documentary proof that during the first years in Samara, Vladimir adhered to the ideology of People’s Will, but the data of later years hardly leaves room for doubt. Later on, we shall hear unimpeachable testimony from Lalayants, Krzhizhanovsky, and others, to the effect that from 1893 to 1895, when Vladimir was a confirmed Marxist on the question of terror, he professed views unusual among Social Democrats, views that were regarded by all as a survival from the preceding period of his evolution. But even if this clear retroactive confirmation were lacking, we should still be compelled to ask: how could there not be such a period?

The political shadow of Alexander followed unrelentingly at Vladimir’s heels for a number of years. ‘Isn’t this the brother of that Ulyanov?’ wrote a high-ranking bureaucrat on the margins of an official document. Everybody saw him in this light. ‘Brother of the Ulyanov who was hanged’, the young radicals would whisper with reverence. Le mort saisit le vif! Vladimir himself never mentioned his brother unless forced by a direct question, and never once named him in print, although there were many opportunities to do so. This very restraint is the surest testimony to the deep scar the death of Alexander left on his consciousness. In order to break with the People’s Will traditions, then, Vladimir needed motivation incomparably more convincing and forceful than he would have for anything else.

The stubborn persistence of his terrorist sympathies, shedding a retrospective light upon that period in his evolution when he was under the influence of People’s Will, had other than personal roots. Vladimir evolved with a whole generation, a whole epoch. Even the first works of the Emancipation of Labour Group (assuming that Vladimir had already become acquainted with them) did not confront him sharply with the question of a break with the traditions of his elder brother. In his discussion of the perspectives for capitalist development in Russia, Plekhanov had not yet contrasted the future Social Democrats to People’s Will, but merely demanded that People’s Will adopt Marxism. Shortly before, the Emancipation of Labour Group had made an attempt to unite with Emigré representatives of People’s Will. If such was the situation – though only at the beginning of the decade – among the émigré where militant theoreticians of both persuasions were at work, then in Russia itself the distinction between People’s Will and the Social Democrats, even at the end of the 1880s, was still very blurred and uncertain. Akselrod, quite rightly, notes in his memoirs: ‘The watershed separating People’s Will from the Social Democrats at the end of the 1880s did not follow the line of distinction between Marxism and Populism, but rather the line between direct political struggle, a phrase then synonymous with terror, and propaganda.’ In cases where Marxists approved of terror, the line of distinction disappeared completely. Thus, Alexander, who had read Our Disagreements, considered that in practice there were no differences between People’s Will and the Social Democrats and that Plekhanov should not have adopted a polemical tone in his dispute with Tikhomirov. In the conspiracy of 1 March 1887, the representatives of both schools of thought acted in accordance with the principles of People’s Will.

The rapprochement between the two ideologies, destined later to break into two irreconcilable camps, had in fact an illusory character that may be explained by their weakness and the general political fogginess of the period. But it was in the midst of this very fog that Vladimir embarked on a theoretical study of Marxism. At the same time, he became acquainted through the stories of the ‘old-timers’ with the practical aspects of the recent struggle, of which Alexander’s case had become the final constituent part. In Samara the workers’ movement did not yet exist even in embryonic form; among the intelligentsia there were only some circles that arose belatedly and developed slowly. There were as yet no Social Democrats at all. Under these circumstances, Vladimir could make great progress in his study of Marxist classics without being forced to make a final choice between Social Democrats and People’s Will. His striving for clarity and conclusiveness undoubtedly constituted a most important motivation for his will and his intellect. No less important was his feeling of responsibility. The fate of Alexander had immediately transferred his thoughts about the ‘struggle for freedom’ from the realm of rosy, youthful dreams to that of stern reality. To make a choice under those circumstances meant to study, to understand, to verify, to become convinced. This required time.

Among Vladimir’s first friends in Samara we find Sklyarenko, a young man of his own age. Expelled from high school while in the sixth grade, and arrested in 1887, he had spent a year in Petersburg’s Kresty Prison. After his return to Samara he had resumed his propagandising efforts among the youth. Primarily as a result of his efforts, a partly legal, partly clandestine little library for self-education was created. According to the instructions of a special guide for propagandists, the more instructive articles were torn out of old monthly magazines, with the first and last pages often having to be copied by hand. Collections of such articles were bound; together with a hundred or so selected and, for the most part, banned books, they constituted the Library of Samara High-School Students, which Vladimir often used during his years in Samara. In collaboration with his friend Semyonov, Sklyarenko published mimeographed materials written in the spirit of People’s Will, the point of view that generally prevailed then among their friends and acquaintances. Had Ulyanov considered himself a Social Democrat during the first two years of his stay in Samara, he would have had bitter debates with Sklyarenko, Semyonov, and their friends, which, if the opponents proved stubborn, would inevitably and very quickly have resulted in a break with them. But nothing of the kind happened, and personal ties were unaffected. On the other hand, his friendship with young members of People’s Will did not result in Vladimir’s participation in their clandestine activities. After what happened to Alexander, he could no longer be impressed by revolutionary schemes of inexperienced young men. He wanted first of all to study, and he soon won Sklyarenko and Semyonov over to the same course.

Vladimir was to spend four winters in Samara. He grew and changed during those years, gradually shifting to Social Democratic positions. Those who observed him and felt his influence changed, too. The boundaries between different stages have been erased in memory. The results of that evolution, which defined themselves by 1892, are now commonly credited to the entire Samara period. This is especially evident in the recollections of his elder sister. According to her, Vladimir debated ‘more and more bitterly’ with the veterans of People’s Will concerning their fundamental principles. This was undoubtedly true. But at what juncture did the disputes begin? And when did they take on a ‘bitter’ character? It was just at the time of her move to Samara that Anna, who then had no particularly clear grasp of theoretical problems, married Yelizarov. Although the two families lived in the same house, the young couple naturally drifted apart from the rest. Vladimir’s first two years in Samara have almost completely slipped from his elder sister’s memory.

We can easily believe that the archaic views of Samara’s ‘veterans’ could not satisfy this young and deeply probing mind. Vladimir may, indeed must, have debated with the veterans even in the first years, not because he had found the truth but because he was looking for it. Only later, toward the end of the Samara period, did these disputes turn into a conflict between the two groups. It is remarkable that Anna Yelizarova, herself searching for a living illustration of these Samara disputes, names as an opponent Vodovozov, a man under police surveillance. The disputes with this hopeless eclectic, who did not consider himself either a Populist or a Marxist, occurred in the winter of 1891-2, i.e. the end of Vladimir’s third year of residence in Samara.

One of the Samarans, it is true, states that during a boating trip organized by a group of leftist youth (evidently in the summer or autumn of 1890) Ulyanov made mincemeat out of the idealistic theory of morality expounded by a certain Buchholtz, and advanced in its stead a class concept. This incident presents the pace of Vladimir’s evolution as somewhat more rapid than other data would suggest. It is worth noting that Buchholtz, a German Social Democrat born in Russia, himself refutes the above story in the very respect that we find of interest: 'At those meetings which we attended together,’ he writes, ‘V. I. Ulyanov, so far as I can remember, did not show any unusual activity and, in any case, did not expound Marxist views.’ The value of this testimony cannot be disputed. Can one suppose that Lenin would have hidden his light under a bushel if the light was already burning? If he did not expound Marxist views, it was because he had not yet arrived at them.

In October 1889, after his arrival in Samara, Vladimir sent to 'his excellency, the honourable minister of public education’, a new petition which was extremely impressive in tone. During the two years since his graduation from high school, he, Vladimir Ulyanov, had had ‘ample opportunity to convince himself of the immense difficulty, if not impossibility, of finding employment for a person without special education’. Moreover the undersigned was in dire need of employment which would enable him ‘to support with his labour a family consisting of an aged mother, and of a brother and sister, both minor’. This time it was not admission to the university he requested, but the right to take a final examination without attendance. Delyanov wrote in pencil on the request: ‘Ask the superintendent and the department of police about him. He’s a rotten man.’ It is obvious that the department of police could not have had a more favourable opinion of the petitioner than the Minister of Education. Thus the ‘rotten man’ received from the ‘kindly, charming man’ yet another refusal.

The doors of formal learning, it seemed, were shut to Vladimir for ever. In the long run it probably would not have altered his destiny very much, but in those days the question of a university diploma seemed very important both to Vladimir and, more especially, to his mother. Maria Alexandrovna travelled to Petersburg in May of 1890 to try to do something for Volodya’s future, just as three years before she had done all she could to save the life of Sasha. ‘It is a grievous pain’, she wrote, ‘to look at my son and see his best years being wasted away…’ In order to arouse the sympathy of the minister, the mother tried to alarm him with the idea that the aimless existence of her son ‘would almost inevitably drive him to the thought of suicide’. In all conscience it must be said that Vladimir hardly resembled a candidate for suicide. But in war – and the mother was waging war for her son – you cannot get along without military deceptions. Delyanov was not, it seems, without sensitivity, for although he did not allow the ‘rotten man’ to return to the university, he did this time permit him to take final examinations in subjects taught by law schools at one of the imperial universities. The Samara police administration officially informed Maria Ulyanova, widow of the state counsellor, of this gracious favour. A positive answer was also received to Vladimir’s request to take the examinations in Petersburg. The mother’s efforts were undoubtedly assisted by the fact that, for the two and a half years since his expulsion, Vladimir had no record of any suspicious activity. Gradually, it seemed, the family was emerging from official disfavour.

In a series of reports from the end of August, police clerks of Samara and Kazan record a journey by Vladimir Ulyanov through Kazan to Petersburg for the purpose of obtaining information regarding the taking of examinations. Vladimir spent six days in Kazan. Which of his former friends did he seek out there? The report of the Kazan police chief gives no information on this point. Vladimir spent nearly two months in Petersburg. The dates are established by the reports of the Samara precinct captain. But we know almost nothing else. It is certain, however, that Vladimir did not waste his time. His chief concern was to make sure he was thoroughly prepared for the examinations. He did not intend to leave the test to chance, to flunk, or to withdraw. He had to have all the elements of the problem before him clarified fully beforehand: the scope of each subject, the textbooks, the requirements of the professors. A considerable part of the time in Petersburg was undoubtedly consumed by work at the public library. In order to avoid buying expensive books it was necessary to take notes and to draw outlines. Through his sister Olga, who was studying in Petersburg, Vladimir got acquainted with his future antagonist, Vodovozov, a classmate of Alexander’s at the university who had arrived from exile in order to take the state examination. With his help, Vladimir succeeded in entering the building where about four hundred students were taking tests. He mingled with the crowd, and according to Vodovozov, ‘sat there for several hours listening and observing’. That preliminary reconnoitring of the arena and the conditions of the coming examination was highly characteristic of young Lenin. He never left to the caprice of chance anything that he might even to the slightest degree anticipate and prepare for in advance.

But Vladimir had one other important item of business in Petersburg. It was during this journey that, through his contacts, he finally obtained from Yavein, a teacher at the Technological Institute, the book by Engels Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science. If the fortunate owner, as we might assume, did not want to let the forbidden book travel to a far-of province, then Vladimir was forced to study this admirable scientific-philosophical tract with great concentration during his short stay in Petersburg. It is possible, however, that after a conversation with the insistent youth the young professor gave in and the Anti-Dühring made the journey from the Neva to the Volga. At any rate, Vladimir first had access to this book no earlier than the autumn of 1890. Radek, relating this incident, cited Lenin himself as the source, and added: ‘It would be a long time before he succeeded in getting at the works of Plekhanov published abroad.’ If the word ‘long’ here means even a few months, then it seems that Vladimir got acquainted with the works of the Emancipation of Labour Group no earlier than the beginning of 1891. Let us keep these dates in mind. Although as a rule Radek’s testimony is not overly accurate, in this case it is outwardly convincing, and it finds support in the general pattern of Vladimir’s evolution.

At the beginning of November the Samara police precinct captain reported to his chief the return of Vladimir Ulyanov. This time, too, it appears, the precinct captain observed ‘nothing suspicious’. However, this candidate in the field of transgressions returning from Petersburg did bring with him, if not in his skull, then in his suitcase, the explosive charge of materialist dialectics. But there was no reason to expect any explosions in the immediate future. For the time being, it was neither Marxism nor revolution that stood in the foreground. It was necessary to wrest a diploma from the hands of the Imperial University. A long period of ‘cramming’ was at hand.

Ilya Nikolayevich’s fears that his son Vladimir might fail to develop a capacity for work truly proved to be unfounded. One of the people under surveillance, the ‘Jacobin’ Yasneva, who arrived in Samara in the spring of 1891, remembers: ‘Such persistence, such stubborn self-discipline as Vladimir Ilyich revealed at that time, I had never seen in anybody else.’ Vladimir came out of his room only for tea and supper and spoke very little. Rarely did any of the family enter his room. In his mode of living he now must have reminded them of Alexander. His work area in the country remained in the garden, in the depths of the linden avenue. Every morning at the same hour he would go out there with his pile of law textbooks and would not return home until three o’clock, ‘You would go out to call him for dinner,’ says a former servant, ‘and there he would be with a book. That he did not waste time is attested to by the level path he wore down alongside his bench while saying over what he had read or learned. By way of rest after dinner he would read in German from Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England or some other Marxist work. He studied German only incidentally, not for die sake of the language but for the sake of Marxism, and for that reason the more rapidly. A walk, a swim, and evening tea would precede the latter part of the day’s work, which was carried out on the veranda by lamplight. Vladimir worked too intensely for any one of the older or younger children even to think of disturbing him during his working hours. Besides, there can be little doubt that, as in his high-school days, he would have had no qualms about telling anyone, ‘Delight us with your absence.’ To compensate for this, during his hours of rest, at the dinner table or while swimming, he was noisy, talkative, jocular, infectiously gay. Every fibre of his brain and body strove to make up for the long hours of Roman and canon law. This young man rested as intensely and passionately as he worked.

How much time did he spend in preparation? A year and a half, says Anna Yelizarova. From her, too, we know that Vladimir ‘set himself to cramming’ only after permission was granted to take the examinations. It would be difficult indeed to imagine that he would have begun to study police law, canon law, or even Roman law, either for his own pleasure or on a gamble that he might receive permission. In that case, then, the preparation did not take up a year and a half; from the ministerial amnesty to the beginning of the examinations was less than eleven months, to the end of the examinations, a year and a half. In another article, Anna Yelizarova speaks of one year. Regular university students spent four years doing the same work!

The examinations had to be taken in two instalments; in the spring, April and May; and in the autumn, September and November. Vladimir arrived in Petersburg in March, a week before the examinations, armed with a research paper on criminal law. It is very likely that the extra week was designed for getting acquainted with students’ lecture notes available in printed form. In planning his own work, Ulyanov was a Taylorist before the Taylor system. The examining commission was chaired by Sergeyevich, the then-popular professor of the history of Russian law, and it comprised the very best professors of the Law School The examiners questioned the stranger whom they were seeing for the first time with distrust, but this distrust rapidly gave way to respect. The at-large student Ulyanov turned out to be excellently prepared.

The list of examination subjects reads like an ironical introduction to the subsequent activity of this defence counsel for the oppressed, of this prosecutor of the oppressors. In the history of Russian law Vladimir Ulyanov got a question 'about ‘the unfree’, all the different categories of serfs; in public law, one about the institutions of social classes, which entailed specific data on the history of legislation affecting the gentry and the organization of peasant self-government. In giving the applicant the highest marks in these subjects, the Imperial University bore witness to the fact that before setting out to liquidate ‘unfree’ conditions, serfdom, and the barbarism of social class, Vladimir Ulyanov had conscientiously prepared himself for his future profession.

In political economy, also in the spring, he had to answer questions on wages and their forms; in general jurisprudence and the history of the philosophy of law, he had one question on Plato’s views on law. Unfortunately we do not know whether Ulyanov expounded to his examiners the labour theory of value and the materialist concept of law as contrasted with all forms of Platonic exploitation. In any case, if he did chide official learning, he did so very cautiously. The commission noted ‘very satisfactory’, which meant the highest grade. The greater part of the examinations, however, was to be taken in the fall.

On the first Sunday of May a small band of Petersburg workers, about seventy in all, celebrated the proletarian holiday for the first time with a secret meeting outside the city; the speeches were soon mimeographed and later published abroad. A central role in Social Democratic propaganda work, which had already achieved significant results, was played by Brusnev, a young engineering student. Although in Petersburg at the time of the May Day celebration, Vladimir evidently knew nothing of this significant event. He had no revolutionary connections, and it is unlikely that he sought them. During the next two years he would still have time to catch up with the Petersburg Marxists, and would move quickly ahead of them thereafter.

At the height of the spring examinations a new blow fell upon the family. The victim was Olga, the sister who had grown up with Vladimir and accompanied him on the piano when he sang. Since the autumn of the previous year, Olga had been studying with great success at the Women’s University in Petersburg. In memoirs this young girl is endowed with most attractive features. Having graduated from high school at fifteen and a half, with a gold medal like those of her brothers, she read much and studied music, English, and Swedish. Z. Nevzorova, a friend of Olga’s at the university and subsequently the wife of the engineer Krzhizhanovsky, the man responsible for the electrification of the USSR, writes in her memoirs:

Olga Ulyanov was not at all the usual type of woman university student of those times. At first glance she was no more impressive than a little black beetle, modest and very ordinary, but in fact she was intelligent and gifted, and worked with a kind of quiet concentration of will power and determination in achieving her aims. She was serious and penetrating in spite of her nineteen years', and was a marvellous companion.

Anna Yelizarova writes, ’In her, as in Sasha, the dominant trait was a sense of duty.’ Olga loved Sasha more than she loved the other brothers and sisters. With Vladimir, in spite of their closeness in age and conditions of their development, she did not feel any spiritual intimacy: but she did listen attentively to what he said and valued his opinion highly.

During Vladimir’s stay in Petersburg that spring, Olga fell ill with typhoid fever. Between two examinations, Vladimir had to take his sister to the hospital – a very poor one, as it turned out. Summoned by a cable from her son, Maria Alexandrovna came immediately to Petersburg, but only to lose a second child there. Olga died on the eighth of May, the very same day on which four years earlier Alexander had been hanged. Just as in Simbirsk when Vladimir had been compelled to take his high-school final examinations immediately after the execution of his elder brother, so now he had to take university examinations during the fatal illness of his younger sister. Immediately after her funeral, Vladimir visited a university friend of Alexander’s, Sergei Oldenburg, the future orientalist of the Academy of Sciences. In contrast to all other memoirists, Oldenburg remembers his visitor as gloomy and silent, without a single smile. The first and most difficult days, Vladimir remained with his mother in Petersburg; afterwards they made the grief-stricken journey back to Samara together. Once again, all were astounded at the courage of the mother – her self-control and her selfless concern for the remaining children.

For three months and more, through the summer, Vladimir trod his path in the depths of the linden avenue. In September he arrived at the capital prepared for the battle. In criminal law he did very well on the questions about defence in criminal trials and about theft of documents. In Roman law he was questioned about impermissible activities and the influence of the statute of limitations on the creation and annulment of laws, two subjects of some interest to a man who was to engage in impermissible activities on rather a grand scale and to annul some rather important laws. Vladimir did very well in ‘police science’, which serves ‘to guarantee the people’s condition of moral and material well-being’. The candidate revealed a no less admirable familiarity with the subject of the organization of the Orthodox Church and the history of its laws. In international law he was questioned about neutrality and blockade. We must leave open the question whether this knowledge was useful to him twenty-eight years later, when Clemenceau and Lloyd George replied with a blockade to the attempts of the Soviets to withdraw from the war. For a diploma first class, one had to have top marks (‘very satisfactory’) in more than half the subjects; Vladimir received the highest mark in each of the thirteen. He could secretly congratulate himself and laugh his short ‘Russian’ laugh.

Vladimir’s third request for a passport to go abroad was denied in October 1891, a month before he finished the examinations. What may have been the aim of this journey? Vladimir had sought out and studied all the fundamental works of Marxism. Much was undoubtedly unavailable to him, especially the materials in the socialist periodicals. The idea of working freely in the libraries of Berlin after passing his examinations must have been particularly alluring to him. From Berlin it would not be difficult to take a trip to Zurich and Geneva, where he could get acquainted with the Emancipation of Labour Group, study all their publications, and clarify points of disagreement. These motives were reason enough, by far, but the police department thought otherwise, Having expressed some strong opinions about the higher authorities, Vladimir did not wait in the capital for the decision of the examinations commission; there was no reason to doubt the result. Indeed, on 15 November, the very day when the Samara precinct captain secretly reported to his chief the return to Samara of Vladimir Ulyanov, a man under unofficial surveillance, the examinations commission of the Law School at St Petersburg’s Imperial University awarded this same person a diploma first class. In a year and a half, in the Samara back country, without any help from professors or older comrades, Vladimir not only accomplished the tasks to which others had to devote four years of their lives, but accomplished them better than others: he stood first in a class of 134 students and at-large candidates. His sister notes that ‘many were amazed’ at this result. And no wonder! In this admirable deed one is attracted, among other things, by an element of intellectual athleticism. He had ‘balanced’ himself well, as well as could be!